According to updated data from Destatis, the federal statistics office, this is the fifth consecutive year the country has updated its naturalization record, and the sharpest jump ever recorded.
Preliminary estimates previously published by Welt am Sonntag put the number of new citizens at 310,000, but Destatis’ final figures were even higher. By comparison, 292,000 people were granted citizenship in 2024 and only about 110,000 in 2021.
The figure has more than tripled in four years.
The “passport record” has two reasons. On the one hand, there is the “delayed decision” effect: a significant proportion of the new citizens in recent years are Syrian refugees who arrived in Germany in 2015 and have now reached the required period of residence to apply for citizenship.
On the other is a legislative shift. The reform of the citizenship law by a coalition of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Union of the Greens and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) reduced the minimum period of residence from eight to five years and allowed dual citizenship for most categories of migrants.
This dramatically accelerated access to a German passport for hundreds of thousands of people.
Critics of these initiatives warn that the possible rollback will hit integration and people already living in the country. Opposition representatives call attempts to tighten the rules a reaction to the growing number of applicants rather than the real problems with the system.
